Meir Dagan great Mossad Chief by a huge strategic failure who failed repeatedly to acknowledge that he answered to much higher authority. The Prime Ministers of an Elected Government. Barak, Netanyahu and prisoner 36783936 Ehud Olmert now servicing 19 months for racketeering, bribery and fraud.
In remarks resembling both a death bed confession and a dramatic political last will and testament, former Mossad Director Meir Dagan said that Benjamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak were two Israeli prime ministers who, at the moment of truth, put their own personal interests over the interests of the nation.
Speaking to Yedioth Ahronoth's Ronen Bergman shortly before his recent death, Dagan said he had feared that the two would pressure the military to attack Iran's nuclear installations. He added that Netanyahu was a "coward," and to make his point, noted that the prime minister would often change his mind on an operation not long after giving it a green light.
Dagan is the last person who can accuse others of putting their personal interests above all else. Right after he was shown the door as Mossad chief (he claimed he resigned), he convened a press conference and completely let his tongue loose. In voicing his anger at the government, he recklessly exposed Israel's plans for dealing with the Iranian nuclear threat. A media frenzy obviously ensued, but his actions were clearly a show of how his personal calculus outweighed any concern for the state.
On top of that, the Israeli Military Censor's Office fought back and ordered news outlets not to publish some of the secrets he had exposed. But Dagan continued, and several months later exposed those very secrets once again at an event at Tel Aviv University. Such callous behavior would have landed him in hot water had he been someone of lesser stature. He would have faced a criminal investigation, like Anat Kamm, who leaked classified information about the Israel Defense Forces to the press.
At the height of the clash between Dagan and Netanyahu-Barak, Dagan spoke freely about the nuclear issue, which dominated the news. At the time, I told him and some members of the Diplomatic-Security Cabinet, that the Israeli government was talking about an impending attack on Iran as part of a master diplomatic plan designed to rattle the world and prompt it to impose more sanctions on Iran. And that is precisely how things ultimately turned out.
Perhaps the only thing that can be said with confidence about this episode is that no one really knows what stopped Israel from attacking the ayatollahs' nuclear program. But Dagan's decision to spill the beans threatened the success of Israel's brinkmanship. His narrative should not be considered any better than the counter narrative.
As someone who later criticized Netanyahu's policy toward U.S. President Barack Obama regarding Iran, I still have no doubt that ratcheting up the sanctions on Iran helped Israel land a significant diplomatic victory. Dagan may have been very accomplished as the head of the Mossad, but his legacy is actually a legacy of failure. Barak and Netanyahu outsmarted him on strategy.
His claim that Netanyahu was a coward is also rather perplexing. He said he would bring along a whole army of Mossad agents to his meetings with Netanyahu when he pitched a certain operation, hoping that once Netanyahu faced such a contingent, he would not dare say no to their operation. If that is really why Dagan brought an entire team with him, that resembles a coup d'etat, at least on a psychological level.
As for the actual claim that Netanyahu was a coward, perhaps Netanyahu was simply acting in an overly-responsible way, which is perfectly natural for a prime minister. True, Netanyahu's predecessor Ehud Olmert greenlighted virtually every operation the Mossad proposed. But so what? This may have turned Dagan into Olmert's future business partner (even after the latter was convicted of crimes), but that doesn't mean Dagan had better judgement than Netanyahu.
There is no way of telling how many operations Netanyahu approved and how many he shot down. It is safe to say he signed off on fewer operations than Olmert. By approving Mossad operations, there is always the risk of failure. The 2010 assassination of a senior Hamas official Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh (widely attributed to the Mossad), was a case in point. If I were Netanyahu, I would wear Dagan's accusation of cowardice as a badge of honor.
No comments:
Post a Comment